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Monday, April 10, 2017

Attempting to move an archive mailbox from one mailbox database to another in Exchange 2016 takes a long time

Problem

You’re attempting to move an archive mailbox of a user from one mailbox database to another in Exchange 2016 but notice that Status in the EAC appears to be stuck in Syncing for a long time and does not complete:

The statistics of the migration request indicates data is either being moved very slowly or not moving at all because the Last synced time can be hours before the current time:

Opening the properties of the move request and navigating to the migration reports section does not show any reports available:

Solution

There could be various reasons why a migration request could appear to be forever syncing and not completing but for the example above, the reason why the move is taking a long time can be found by using the following cmdlets to obtain more information.

Begin by verifying that the cmdlet is displaying the same results as the EAC GUI:

Stalledduetotarget_mdbreplication:This value is also returned from Data Guarantee API on checking the replication health of the target database copies if they are a member of DAG and have database copies.We might get this message if the MRS service is waiting to get this information from the target server about the replication status of the database copies.

So, in this case, the passive copy must be:1) Healthy.2) Must have a replay queue with 10 mins of replay lag time.3) Have a copy queue length less than 10 logs.4) Have an average copy queue length less than 10 logs.

In the example above, the reason why the migration is taking so long is because there is a delay with the replication between the servers in the DAG hosting the target mailbox database. This can be determined by reviewing the passive copy’s Copy queue length:

I’ve noticed that the environment I was working in would have this value jump between 0 to 50, which basically indicates there’s a slight replication delay between the two servers in the DAG. The archive mailbox move is indeed being moved but at a very slow pace. This can be verified by executing:

Get-MoveRequest | Get-MoveRequestStatistics

… or:

Get-MoveRequestStatistics -Identity "Marchelle Joell"

… and confirming that the value for PercentComplete is indeed increasing:

The only options you’ll have if the above is your scenario is to either correct the replication delay or simply wait for a longer duration to move the archive mailbox due to the problem.